The Mozilla Foundation is testing a new mechanism for securing domain name server traffic that uses the encrypted HTTPS channel. It is an attempt to speed up the internet, reduce the threat of man-in-the-middle attacks and keep prying eyes from monitoring what users do online.

Starting in the next several weeks, Mozilla plans to run tests using a developer version of its Firefox browser with the help of the Mozilla developer community and content management and delivery network firm Cloudflare. Developers will be testing a proposed standard called Trusted Recursive Resolver via DNS over HTTPS, or DoH for short. The standard is winding its way through a draft process and is scheduled to be voted on for ratification by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) later this year.

However, despite potential gains in speed, security and privacy, some have expressed concerns pointing out that centralizing DNS traffic through gatekeepers trades one privacy problem with another.

Even the most vigilant internet users are susceptible to this IDN homograph attack

A new wave of Unicode Domain Phishing attacks are tricking even the most seasoned of internet veterans thanks to its clever use of homographs.

For those that don’t know a homograph is a set of two or more words that are spelled the same but have different meanings and origins. In this case, homograph is an imperfect descriptor, but it’s still sufficient. To execute a Unicode Domain Phishing attack, you first need a Unicode domain. Typically, the URLs you type are in ASCII, that stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. However, in 2003, a specification was added to allow Unicode characters to be used in domain names. Unicode is an industry standard for encoding text expressed in most of the world’s written languages. The idea behind this was to give international internet users the ability to follow links in their own language. But, as with everything on the internet, somebody found a way to exploit this.

Researcher Xudong Zheng published a proof of concept last year that highlights the issue. In the POC, Zheng uses Unicode to produce a web page that resembles Apple’s. To do this, he created a domain with Punycode, which allows for Internationalized Domain Names. He then mixed in Unicode with ASCII to create a website that actually says “Apple.com”

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